Feminism

The idea that gender is a spectrum is a new gender prison. What is gender?

This is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.
Teaching Men to Be Emotionally Honest. Photo Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first .

Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!
… Aw, big boy!
The Anima and Animus. Is Legalized Prostitution Safer? - Room for Debate. A Cold War Fought by Women. Tracy Vaillancourt One of these outfits worn in Dr.

Tracy Vaillancourt's study on female aggression provoked a sort of "mean girl" form of indirect aggression. The other attracted little notice at all. Science has come a long way since then, as Dr. Hrdy notes in her introduction to a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society devoted entirely to the topic of female aggression.
A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?
There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Then came feminism — specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century.
Swedish School De-emphasizes Gender Lines. Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently - Olga Khazan. Ready your knowing smirk, because here comes a scientific gem that’s sure to enliven even the dullest of holiday parties.

By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres. Yes, take that, Mike from IT!
Sex redefined. Illustration by Jonny Wan As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients.

But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex. A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb.
Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct. By Eric W.

DolanMonday, February 4, 2013 17:33 EDT A first-of-its-kind study to be published in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has dealt a devastating blow to the notion that men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to how they think and act. “Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is,” Bobbi J. Carothers of Washington University in St. Louis and Harry T. Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical.
Ranked: Disney Princesses From Least To Most Feminist. It's hard to be liberated in a clamshell bikini. by Sonia Saraiya. BEAUTY-AT-ANY-COST.PDF (application/pdf Object)
Fotoshop by Adobé. Dove releases rogue Photoshop action that undoes 'real beauty' manipulations.

Skin care company Dove has targeted airbrushers and photo manipulators with a Photoshop action in an attempt to take its "real beauty" campaign viral.

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty was launched just under a decade ago with the aim to "change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty.
" After multiple ad campaigns, Dove is this time trying to send a message to the artists that manipulate photos by releasing a Photoshop action called "Beautify" that reverts images to their original state and overlays a banner proclaiming "don't manipulate our perceptions of real beauty.
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Dove Real Beauty Sketches. Killing Us Softly 4 - Trailer [Featuring Jean Kilbourne]
Masculinity Is Killing Men: The Roots of Men and Trauma.

“The three most destructive words that every man receives when he’s a boy is when he’s told to 'be a man,'” —Joe Ehrmann, coach and former NFL player If we are honest with ourselves, we have long known that masculinity kills men, in ways both myriad and measurable.

While social constructions of femininity demand that women be thin, beautiful, accommodating, and some unattainable balance of virginal and fuckable, social constructions of masculinity demand that men constantly prove and re-prove the very fact that they are, well, men. Both ideas are poisonous and potentially destructive, but statistically speaking, the number of addicted and afflicted men and their comparatively shorter lifespans proves masculinity is actually the more effective killer, getting the job done faster and in greater numbers.
The One Thing All Men Feel, But Never Admit. Every single boy growing up in the United States has heard these phrases at least once over the course of his life.

They are all too common. They are also all too damaging. Most think that "toughening" boys is just a rite of passage, but a growing body of research is showing just how harmful these messages can be. A new documentary brought to us by MissRepresentation entitled The Mask You Live In will be exploring the systemic societal problems caused by toxic masculinity.
Miss representation Trailer.

Dads on Sitcoms - Alexis C. Madrigal. On television shows, dads have been portrayed as incompetent dolts reflecting and encouraging a damaging attitude towards men and childcare.

My son. (Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic)
Men Feel Bad Around Smart, Successful Women. By Lisa Wade, PhD, Dec 26, 2013, at 01:51 pm We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in. Enjoy!
Men's Magazines and the Construction of Masculinity. The Rise and Fall of Charm in American Men - Benjamin Schwarz. If one were to recast The Rockford Files, as Universal Pictures is intending to do, would the Frat Pack actor Vince Vaughn seem the wisest choice to play Jim Rockford, the character James Garner inhabited with such sly intelligence and bruised suavity?

Universal apparently thinks so. One can say many things about the talents of Vaughn, and were Universal embarking on a bit of polyester parody—remaking, say, Tony Rome, among the least of the neo-noirs—Vaughn’s gift for sending up low pop would be just so. But to aim low in this case is to miss the deceptive grace that Garner brought to the original, and prompts a bigger question: Whatever happened to male charm—not just our appreciation of it, or our idea of it, but the thing itself?

Yes, yes, George Clooney—let’s get him out of the way. For nearly 20 years, any effort to link men and charm has inevitably led to Clooney.
'It's Not a Contradiction for Men to Discriminate Against Other Men' - Noah Berlatsky. A scholar of gender studies on reconciling feminism with the reality of gender bias against men Jae C.

Hong/AP I recently argued that the way the show Orange Is the New Black deals with men, and especially male prisoners, is problematic, since the vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. are men, not women, and because the show uses stereotypical gender assumptions to elicit sympathy for women prisoners in ways don't translate into an institutional critique of prison as a whole.
The Demise Of Guys By Philip Zimbardo. The-death-of-adulthood-in-american-culture. Photo. The Danger in Demonizing Male Sexuality. Overdoing Gender. Aggressive advertising makes for aggressive men. Colin Stokes: How movies teach manhood.

Images of Men in Advertising. "What is a man?
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A New Masculinity. Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents. The Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine: Introduction. Gender Gap Stops Growing. A report being released today says that the gender gap in college enrollments has largely leveled off, with the key exception of Latino enrollments, where men are falling further behind women. The report by the American Council on Education comes amid much talk nationally about the significance of trends that have left men making up only about 43 percent of college enrollments and new college graduates.

Some colleges have gone so far as to talk about affirmative action for men, which in turn has prompted an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. And a flurry of articles have suggested problems for the United States economy and society if male educational attainment continues to decline. The message of the report is largely encouraging, noting that "several indicators suggest that the size of the gender gap in higher education may have stabilized" and that the number of bachelor's degrees being awarded to men is again on the rise.
The Myth of Male Decline. The Hidden Brain: How Ocean Currents Explain Our Unconscious Social Biases.

Gender pay gap: The familiar line that “women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar” simply isn’t accurate. What 'War on Women'? — National Review. Men more likely than women to compromise values for career success. Here’s another possible explanation why there are so few cracks in the corporate glass ceiling: Men seem far more willing than women to sacrifice their ethical values in exchange for money or success on the job.
Myths-Dreams-Symbols-Shadow Feminism. Domestic Violence Against Men: Women More Likely To Be 'Intimate Terrorists' With Controlling Behavior In Relationships. Why I loathe feminism ... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family. Feminine Sexual Repression. The Truth About Female Desire: It’s Base, Animalistic and Ravenous. V1P1-No13_Dykeman_1179608105947.pdf (application/pdf Object)
A short history of "feminist" anti-feminists.

Why Women Aren’t Crazy. Why I Believe Men Belong in the Feminist Movement. The Roots of Individualist Feminism in 19th-Century America by Wendy McElroy. History of feminism. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. History of Marriage in Western Civilization. Think Tank: Transcript for "Has Feminism Gone Too Far?"
Resolved: Women Are Better Than Men. The Weekend Interview With Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues. Camille Paglia: How Bill Clinton is like Bill Cosby. ‘Everything in the world is about sex’